“If I had to describe what I consider her most important quality, among the many, it would be her ability to inspire others and create solidarity in a far-flung community of filmmakers and ordinary people who responded to her openly honest humanity.”

–Amalie R. Rothschild, Co-founder, New Day Films

“Losing Julia, who we had as a dear friend, colleague, and co-founder of New Day for the better part of our working lives is very hard. We have lost a part of our family.  She will always be in our hearts and in our history.”

–Liane Brandon, Co-founder, New Day Films

Struggles, Solutions, Solidarities:

Julia Reichert (1946-2022)

By Patricia R. Zimmermann

Julia sat in a circle in the basement of the Student Union at the University of Iowa surrounded by women college students in flannel shirts, jeans, and work boots drinking coffee to power them through a night at the library to study for final exams.

It was 1976. I was a senior in college. I had just watched Julia Reichert and Jim Klein’s Union Maids (1976) in the campus theater. I don’t know who brought her to campus. I don’t know who introduced her. I don’t remember the discussion. I was enthralled to meet a woman filmmaker, as the only woman my cinema studies classes mentioned was a Nazi woman (Leni Riefenstahl). I was excited to see a film about unions, as my grandfather worked as a labor union activist to organize miners.

I can’t remember if there was a moderated post-screening discussion with the “director” because, at least for me, something much bigger happened that night, something I had never experienced before:  a group of us students, some who wanted to be filmmakers, some who were feminist activists, and some who were both, were sitting in a circle with feminist independent filmmaker Julia Reichert. She talked to us as equals, assuming we were all part of the struggle to topple patriarchy and capitalism, and much more.

No professor or film expert moderated. She did not share the backstory of her filmmaking process or her artistic practice. Instead, she infused that circle with another P:  politics. She refused the ego of a director and instead put our voices first. One of my friends whispered in my ear that Julia (which is what she insisted we call her) was being totally subversive, running the session not as a mentor with acolytes, but as a political organizing meeting.  

I was too intimidated to say anything. Hope and urgent politics loomed larger than my own words. In graduate school, militant women graduate students older than me at the University of Wisconsin heralded Union Maids as a landmark feminist film and pushed for it to be on documentary history syllabi along with Robert Flaherty, Joris Ivens, and Robert Drew. 

Seven years later, I met Julia again, at the 1983 Robert Flaherty Film Seminar at Wells College.  She and Jim Klein screened Seeing Red: Stories of American Communists (1983). I was an Assistant Professor teaching film history and theory and arguing for documentary to be included in film programs, as it was marginalized back then. It took me a couple of days to jack up my courage to speak with her. I was captivated by her absolute clarity about people and politics, her ability to honor the voices of all in the theater or in groups of people who circled around her constantly.  I decided I wanted to be like her: to have clarity and community and people and political struggle.

I drifted accidentally into one of those circles endlessly floating around her when she ended up behind me in the cafeteria as we queued up for bacon and scrambled eggs. I handed her a plate as she held her tray. She asked me my name, and I gushed that I had been on the floor in a circle with her in the basement of the University of Iowa campus union after seeing Union Maids. 

I don’t remember what we talked about, but I think I squeaked out that Union Maids was one of the films that got me thinking about documentary as a political interventionist project of reclamation and galvanization that had pivoted me to research documentary theory and history in graduate school.  She was so friendly, smiling, asking questions about my life at Ithaca College and in upstate New York as we waited in that line. And then, without any effort, I somehow ended up at a table with a group of other feminists of all ages where we fervently critiqued the sexism of the Flaherty seminar and the male domination of the documentary world. 

It took another decade, a special issue of the scholarly journal Wide Angle, and a long book project for me to screw up the courage to ask Julia about the formation of New Day Films. In the mid-1990s, the Flaherty was in trouble with funding challenges, low attendance, and endless controversies that seemed to shred the heart and soul of the entire organization.  Ruth Bradley, then the editor of Wide Angle, suggested Erik Barnouw and I create a quadruple special issue (1996, volume 17, Nos 1-4) to celebrate its survival over 40 years. She conjured the name:  The Flaherty. Erik Barnouw came up with the subtitle:  Four Decades in the Cause of Independent Cinema.  

Erik and I invited about 20 scholars and filmmakers to write essays. Julia immediately responded, did a 90-minute call with me, and wrote a piece whose title sums up how she imagined the world: “Collective.”  

In this piece, Julia wrote about the influential filmmakers she met at the Flaherty such as Dusan Makavejev, Emile De Antonio, and Chris Marker. She describes the lifelong friends she made at the seminar, which she felt was so important since she made her home in what she called “a remote outpost of the filmmaking world”—Ohio. She wrote: “The Flaherty gave us: continuity with the past, mentors, and an intelligent ear to our brash pronouncements.  It was a civilizing force in the best sense of that word.”  

As tributes to Julia pour out of the independent and commercial film communities note, Julia was perhaps one of the most influential and prolific documentary filmmakers in the United States over a 50-year career. But this kind of auteurist reframing of her narrative as an award-winning director denies those circles and collectives that she mobilized that have sustained not only me but the independent documentary community. 

Let me move us now beyond the auteur to the collective.  

For nearly a decade, Scott MacDonald and I worked on a scholarly book to chronicle the history of the Flaherty. Erik Barnouw always wanted a book or a series of books chronicling the history of the seminar, such an important but unknown part of international film history. We finally succumbed to his directive and wrote The Flaherty: Decades in the Cause of Independent Cinema (2017), the first of our two books on the Flaherty.

As we figured out periodization, we knew the 1970s were a significant time to analyze in terms of both the larger film culture and the history of the Flaherty.  This was a period of intense political filmmaking, collectives, and the invention of new infrastructures of funding, distribution, and exhibition for independent cinema.

And that led me back to Julia, as I had heard many stories--some hypothetical and some rumors--about the connection between New Day Films and the seminar. I reached out to her again. She was very busy working on a big film at the time. I told her I just needed a short call to fact-check in order to get the story right from the ground up. 

She told me that the two of us needed more time than a quick fact check: we needed to talk. She wanted us both to have time to talk. We had two or three conversations over the course of about two years.  I sought out her help to flesh out the vague primary source documents and untangle the story. Julia helped me to see that the emergence of New Day was propelled not by filmmaker narcissism, but by something else much larger and more powerful:  debates and struggles to change the entire racist patriarchal system of cinema.

Here is what I learned from her, now chronicled in the Flaherty book.

In the early 1970s, Willard Van Dyke, then President of the Flaherty Seminar, yanked the seminar’s programming from Frances Flaherty’s dedication to the lyrical and the poetic to a more outward direction. He brought in independent film, animation, experimental, and politically engaged filmmaking from African Americans, the regions between New York and Los Angeles, and women. Feminist filmmaking luminaries such as Abigail Child, Liane Brandon, Joyce Chopra, Amalie R. Rothschild, Barbara Kopple, Holly Fisher, and Cinda Firestone, all showed work at the seminar during this period.  

At the 1971 seminar, the anger of women attendees was mounting over the issue of the Flaherty as a virtually all-male bastion.  Julia and almost all the women attendees organized an emergency breakfast meeting with an agenda:  a discussion about the importance of women’s issues in documentary.

Because I want us to move away from the auteurism and individuality so pervasive in the contemporary documentary industry now (whatever that is….), I want to honor Julia’s commitment to the collective by naming all the women filmmakers and programmers who attended that meeting, as Julia was part of the women’s movement and feminist politics, not simply an auteur:  Chloe Aaron, Suzanne Baumann, Kit Clarke, Nadine Covert, Deborah Dickson Mary Feldbauer Jansen, Tana Hoban, Victoria Hochberg, Jeanne Mulcahy, Kristina Nordstrom, Julia Reichert, Amalie Rothschild, Janet Sternburg, and Miriam Weinstein.  

Julia and Jim Klein, her filmmaking partner for over 15 years, ascertained a need for a more substantive development of a viable infrastructure to support feminist film distribution. They had begun self-distributing Growing Up Female at the time and were beginning to find a way to distribute to nascent women’s organizations. In 1971, New Day Films was formed when Julia and Jim met Amalie Rothschild at the Flaherty Seminar. That fall, during the weekly screenings held in Amalie’s loft of the selection committee for the First International Festival of Women’s Films (organized by Kristina Nordstrom — almost the entire selection committee was made up of the women from that Flaherty breakfast) Julia and Amalie saw Anything You Want to Be submitted by Liane Brandon and thought it would be a perfect film for New Day, which from the beginning was a collective to connect films to progressive social change movements. Julia, Jim, Amalie, and Liane put together their first mass mailing of their film brochures under the banner of New Day Films in January 1972.  So 2022 is not only the year that Julia died, but is also the 50th anniversary of New Day Films.

As I thought about Julia and her large body of films to write this piece, I knew I needed to dive beneath the tributes that frame her as an Academy Award-winning director who climbed her way to indie documentary industry prestige. I realized that her films such as Growing Up Female (1971), Union Maids (1976), Seeing Red: Stories of American Communists (1983), Last Truck: Closing of a GM Plant (2009), American Factory (2019), 9 to 5: Story of a Movement (2020) are so much more than the individual vision of a director. They form another kind of circle, one where everyday people have agency and power with each other.

Most of her films were collaborations with Jim Klein and later, Steve Bognar. They reject individualism, narcissism, isolation, and pessimism. They present a deeply feminist vision of America that show us how hope resides in fierce loyalties to others and collective action.  They excise antagonists and protagonists and a single hero. Instead, they show us the power of the many always wins out over the solitude of the one. And they carry on Julia’s clear, grounded politics that struggle, solutions, and solidarities are what matter most.

The founders of New Day in 1976: Liane Brandon, Jim Klein, Julia Reichert, Amalie Rothschild